I want to upgrade something for my b'day and this is what I have:

Core i5 750
Gigabyte P55M-UD2
2x2Gb G.Skill Ripjaws DDR3 1600
Sapphire Vapor-x Radeon HD4890
Western Digital Caviar Black 1Tb HD
Seagate 7200.something 1.5Tb HD
SAMSUNG EcoGreen F2 1Tb HD
HD-DVD/Blu-ray/DVD-RW combo drive

Then other stuff..spiffy slim backlit Logitech keyboard, my trusty old MX1000, Samsung 20" LCD, Logitech Z560's. I'd like an IPS panel eventually but that's not happening yet.

I'm thinking about a 64Gb SSD - plenty for OS, frequently used programs and page file. Games/etc will go on the WD Black, and everything else on the slower drives.

It seems Sandforce is the way to go - any specific recommendations?

I always liked the Lusankya better than the Executor myself.

-I also used to always misread it as "Executioner", and was disappointed when I realized one day how badly I'd messed up.

Although I am probably more partial to an Eclipse-class.

Intel X25-M G3 (25 nm) when available.

80, 160, 300 and 600 GB models - hmm, seems 1Tb is going to be coming pretty soon at this rate, albeit likely at a prohibitive cost.

Any idea on market pricing for the 80Gb? I'm looking around the intarwebz at the moment..seeing if I can find something.

Looks like you cant go wrong with anything Sandforce based.

I don't know the specifics right now, but check out bit-tech.net for reviews of SSDs. They do some pretty good benchmarks.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820233125

I bought this one and am very happy with it. I think I paid $199 for it though. (read the reviews if you're using it for windows, some people have problems with wakeup or something)

I use it as my primary drive for linux, including my home directory. It boots in less than 10 seconds (counting from AFTER the bios splash). My specs are similar to yours although I have the i5-760 (not sure that makes any difference). I notice the speed most when booting and when launching programs. I also notice it during game "loading" screens (although I only have quake4/doom3 to compare ssd vs non-ssd). It takes significantly longer to load on the same machine under windows 7 with my caviar black.

It's really nice but if you leave your computer on all the time I'm not sure it's worth the money.

Those are the names of my two main PCs

I plan to get around 200-300 gigs of solid state for my next machine, OS and Steam on that drive, and everything else on a HDD. Not sure how much difference it will make, but it probably can't hurt.

I have 128 in my desktop, and I wish I had a little more. It's only really used for Windows and games, but it's easy to fill it up. I have a lot of Steam games stuck on my secondary RAID 0 array and then just a symlink where Steam is looking for them on the SSD. I try to keep only games that have loading time issues on the SSD.

ooo how do you do that? that would be fantastic...

Why don't you just move Steam entirely to the RAID array? It's not like Steam cares at all where it is located.

Faster loading times off the SSD.

Steam doesn't care where it's located, but it will only install games on the drive it's installed on. This way, I can have some Steam games on the SSD, some on the RAID array.

Unless you're just saying move Steam over to the RAID array, then symlink back to the SSD from the RAID array, which I could do, just haven't bothered to.

I use symbolic links too, my Steam is installed on my harddrive but select games are installed on the SSD. There are a few free utilities like 'Junction Link Magic' if you dont want to deal with command line.

Hmmmmm with a Radeon 5870 at $200 right now, I am tempted to do that instead....

I have my i5 at 3.5 on air, see if you can beat it!

No need...it does just fine stock.

Yeah if they go any lower I might have to crossfire

I just did a couple weeks ago. Getting a second for almost half of what the first one cost was too tempting.

I'm a bit of an odd one in that I never crossfire, I always get a new card as a soon as a reasonable costing new one has twice the specs of the old one. This probably costs me more in the end, but on one hand I save money on power supplies and don't have to try and fit two massive cards in my case.
While you are all here, would upgrading from 4 to 8 gigs of ram be a noticeable benefit yet? I'm plenty happy with the 4 I have but RAM is getting insanely cheap.

Not positive how much it will benefit you. A few computers ago when I went from 4gb to 8gb and was running Vista, it was a noticable difference for me. It was probably just a result of more ram to act as a cache for reading off the harddrive, but applications opened faster and the system was overall more responsive. If I had an SSD at the time, I'm not sure I would have noticed. Also your running Win7 which obviously is better at managing system memory than Vista.

But DDR3 is cheap right now and the memory standard doesnt seem to be changing in the immediate future... I personally have 12gb of spare DDR3 laying around for future builds. I'm trying to convince myself to go Sandy Bridge but so far I'm failing.

Yeah I'll probably go for it once I get the chance to go out, ****ing weather sucks. Sorry for the siderail.

Massive amounts of memory for gaming are still wasted a lot because almost all games are still running on 32-bit processes, which are usually limited to only 2 GB in Windows anyway, unless they're actually built with the IMAGE_FILE_LARGE_ADDRESS_AWARE flag set. So you get nice multitasking benefits out of it, but not really in terms of gaming performance unless you're playing on of the very few games that can actually use that much memory.

Of course I say all that, yet I do have 12 GB in my desktop, lol.

Darth, you sure about that? I think on Win64 each 32-bit process can allocate a full 4GB of memory.

Only if it's flagged to be able to do so. Lots of stuff (like WoW even) isn't, and maxes out at 2 GB because that's the default limit.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa366778(v=vs.85).aspx

I'd be surprised if you could actually use more than 3 GB, because there are probably a lot of apps out there that depend on the old memory layout....